As 2023 comes to a close, grim numbers in Gaza are piling up, where Israel’s bombardment and invasion have thus far killed more than 21,000 people, including 8,200 children and 6,200 women. Those dire statistics lay alongside the grievous outcome of Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed—including 36 children—and nearly 250 Israelis were taken hostage by Hamas, again, including about 30 children.
But beyond the dismal casualty statistics, we’re ending the year on what may be a more lasting concern for the future of the region: Israel’s response has been characterized by many as war crimes, with its larger goals for the conflict tantamount to genocide, or at the very least, a plan to displace the entire population in an act of ethnic cleansing. Experts in the field have decried these tactics, and others, as crimes against humanity.
Israeli officials, in their own words, seem to tacitly acknowledge that their critics’ worst fears are far from unfounded. In early November, Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” referring to the war against Palestinians and seizure of territory that marked Israel’s founding in 1948.
Observers have been quick to confirm that reality is matching the rhetoric. “That’s what we’re seeing right now: the displacement of Palestinians, pushing millions to increasingly shrinking areas, because the idea is that there will be no more Palestinians in Gaza after this war,” said Raz Segal, associate professor of holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide at Stockton University.
The man who bears the most responsibility for these war crimes is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“It’s really rare for war criminals to just openly announce their actions,” said John Cox, professor of global studies and history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who also directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies. That’s what’s “unique about Israel’s bombing in Gaza.”
Cox noted that this month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. “[The war in Gaza] literally does take on genocidal proportions and potential, along with daily humiliations and affronts to human rights that Israel has been engaging in for 75 years,” Cox said.
On October 28, for example, Netanyahu referred to Gazans as Amalek, invoking a Biblical enemy. In 1 Samuel 15:1-35, the prophet Samuel tells the king, Saul, to “attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”
“When you invoke Amalek, the message of total destruction of Palestinians is very very clear. It’s not open to multiple interpretations or anything like that,” Segal said.
The soldiers and officers in the Israeli military understand this very well, Segal said. He pointed to videos from Gaza showing Israeli soldiers dancing and singing a song in Gaza that proclaims that they’re there to root out the seed of Amalek.
“They say very directly in their slogan that there are no innocent civilians,” Segel said. “This portrayal of an entire community is a common genocidal mechanism.”
Other actions from Israeli soldiers also echo Netanyahu’s proclamations. A December 8 video from Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood shows Israeli soldiers setting fire to a truck with food and water in it, fitting Israel’s October 9 declaration of a “complete siege” of Gaza, in which Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. This is an unambiguous violation of the second article of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, which includes “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members” of a particular group, as well as the deliberate “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
“Numerous experts are all saying that what we’re seeing in Gaza is unprecedented levels of destruction and killing, very similar and probably more intense than the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the first months of the invasion, which Biden described as genocide,” Segal said.
“For Netanyahu specifically, he’s been the head of state for the vast majority of time SINCE 1996,” said Segal. “What we’re seeing in Gaza, we can argue in many ways, it’s the culmination of Netanyahu’s policies towards Palestinians, not just in Gaza.”
TNR
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